Leading Scientists Explain How Climate Change Is Worsening California’s Drought

Scientists have long predicted that climate change would bring on ever-worsening droughts, especially in semi-arid regions like the U.S. Southwest. As climatologist James Hansen, who co-authored one of the earliest studies on this subject back in 1990, told me this week, “Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change.”

Why does it matter if climate change is playing a role in the Western drought? As one top researcher on the climate-drought link reconfirmed with me this week, “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999.” If his and other projections are correct, then there may be no greater tasks facing humanity than 1) working to slash carbon pollution and avoid the worst climate impact scenarios and 2) figuring out how to feed nine billion people by mid-century in a Dust-Bowl-ifying world.

Remarkably, climate scientists specifically predicted a decade ago that Arctic ice loss would bring on worse droughts in the West, especially California. As it turns out, Arctic ice loss has been much faster than the researchers — and indeed all climate modelers — expected.

And, of course, California is now in the death-grip of a brutal, record-breaking drought, driven by the very change in the jet stream that scientists had anticipated. Is this just an amazing coincidence — or were the scientists right? And what would that mean for the future? Building on my post from last summer, I talked to the lead researcher and several other of the world’s leading climatologists and drought experts.

First, a little background. Climate change makes Western droughts longer and stronger and more frequent in several ways, as I discussed in my 2011 literature review in the journal Nature:

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.

I labeled this synergy Dust-Bowlification. The West has gotten hotter thanks to global warming, and that alone is problematic for California.

“The extra heat from the increase in heat trapping gases in the atmosphere over six months is equivalent to running a small microwave oven at full power for about half an hour over every square foot of the land under the drought,” climatologist Kevin Trenberth explained to me via email, during a drought. “No wonder wild fires have increased! So climate change undoubtedly affects the intensity and duration of drought, and it has consequences. California must be very vigilant with regard to wild fires as the spring arrives.”

Climate change undoubtedly affects the intensity and duration of drought, and it has consequences.

And then we have the observed earlier snow melt, which matters in the West because it robs the region of a reservoir needed for the summer dry season — see “US Geological Survey (2011): Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply” and “USGS (2013): Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains.”

As climatologist and water expert Peter Gleick noted to me, quite separate from the impact of climate change on precipitation, “look at the temperature patterns here, which are leading to a greater ratio of rain-to-snow, faster melting of snow, and greater evaporation. Those changes alone make any drought more intense.”

But what of the possibility that climate change is actually contributing to the reduction in rainfall? After all, as Daniel Swain has noted, “calendar year 2013 was the driest on record in California’s 119 year formal record, and likely the driest since at least the Gold Rush era.”

Trenberth explained that, according to climate models, “some areas are more likely to get drier including the SW: In part this relates a bit to the “wet get wetter and dry get drier” syndrome, so the subtropics are more apt to become drier. It also relates to the expansion and poleward shift of the tropics.”

Back in 2005, I first heard climatologist Jonathan Overpeck discuss evidence that temperature and annual precipitation had started to head in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest, which raises the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought.” Overpeck, a leading drought expert at the University of Arizona, warned “climate change seldom occurs gradually.”

What’s going on in the Southwest is what anthropogenic global warming looks like for the region.

In a major 2008 USGS report, Abrupt Climate Change, the Bush Administration (!) warned: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”

There is broad agreement in the climate science research community that the Southwest, including New Mexico, will very likely continue to warm. There is also a strong consensus that the same region will become drier and increasingly snow-free with time, particularly in the winter and spring. Climate science also suggests that the warmer atmosphere will lead to more frequent and more severe (drier) droughts in the future. All of the above changes have already started, in large part driven by human-caused climate change.

Overpeck told me this week, “because I think the science only gets stronger with time, I’ll stick to my statements that you quote.” He added, “what’s going on in the Southwest is what anthropogenic global warming looks like for the region.”

Beyond the expansion and drying of the subtropics predicted by climate models, some climatologists have found in their research evidence that the stunning decline in Arctic sea ice would also drive western drought — by shifting storm tracks.

“Given the very large reductions in Arctic sea ice, and the heat escaping from the Arctic ocean into the overlying atmosphere, it would be surprising if the retreat in Arctic sea ice did *not* modify the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere in some way,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told me this week. “We now have a healthy body of research, ranging from Lisa Sloan’s and Jacob Sewall’s work a decade ago, to Francis’s more recent work, suggesting that we may indeed be seeing already this now in the form of more persistent anomalies in temperature, rainfall, and drought in North America.”

As the news release at the time explained, they “used powerful computers running a global climate model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to simulate the effects of reduced Arctic sea ice.” And “their most striking finding was a significant reduction in rain and snowfall in the American West.”

“Where the sea ice is reduced, heat transfer from the ocean warms the atmosphere, resulting in a rising column of relatively warm air,” Sewall said. “The shift in storm tracks over North America was linked to the formation of these columns of warmer air over areas of reduced sea ice in the Greenland Sea and a few other locations.”

Last year, I contacted Sloan to ask her if she thought there was a connection between the staggering loss of Arctic sea ice and the brutal drought gripping the West, as her research predicted. She wrote, “Yes, sadly, I think we were correct in our findings, and it will only be worse with Arctic sea ice diminishing quickly.”

This week, Sewall wrote me that “both the pattern and even the magnitude of the anomaly looks very similar to what the models predicted in the 2005 study (see Fig. 3a).” Here is what Sewall’s model predicted in his 2005 paper, “Precipitation Shifts over Western North America as a Result of Declining Arctic Sea Ice Cover”:

Figure 3a: Differences in DJF [winter] averaged atmospheric quantities due to an imposed reduction in Arctic sea ice cover. The 500-millibar geopotential height (meters) increases by up to 70 m off the west coast of North America. Increased geopotential height deflects storms away from the dry locus and north into the wet locus

“Geopotential height” is basically the height above mean sea level for a given pressure level. The “500 mb level is often referred to as the steering level as most weather systems and precipitation follow the winds at this level…. This level averages around 18,000 feet above sea level and is roughly half-way up through the weather producing part of the atmosphere called the troposphere.”

Now here is what the 500 mb geopotential height anomaly looked like over the last year, via NOAA:

Look familiar? That is either an accurate prediction or one heck of a coincidence. The San Jose Mercury News described what was happening in layman’s terms:

… meteorologists have fixed their attention on the scientific phenomenon they say is to blame for the emerging drought: a vast zone of high pressure in the atmosphere off the West Coast, nearly four miles high and 2,000 miles long, so stubborn that one researcher [Swain] has dubbed it the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.”

Like a brick wall, the mass of high pressure air has been blocking Pacific winter storms from coming ashore in California, deflecting them up into Alaska and British Columbia, even delivering rain and cold weather to the East Coast.

This high pressure ridge is forcing the jet stream along a much more northerly track. Sewall told me that multiple factors are driving drought in California:

There are, of course, caveats. This is one year, the model studies were looking at averages of multiple decades (20 or 50 years). There are other factors besides the Arctic ice that influence storm tracks; some preliminary work suggests that a strong El Nino overwhelms any influence of the ice. In El Nino “neutral” times (such as recently), the ice impact can have more of an effect.

And for this year, it looks like ice may well be having more of an effect. The geopotential height anomaly looks very much like what the models predicted as sea ice declined. The storm track response also looks very similar with correspondingly similar impacts on precipitation (reduced rainfall in CA, increased precipitation in SE Alaska). While other factors play an influence, the similarity of these patterns certainly suggests that we shouldn’t discount warming climate and declining Arctic sea ice as culprits in the CA drought.

NOAA and Prof. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers have more recently shown that the loss of Arctic ice is boosting the chances of extreme US weather.

…this extremely distorted and persistent jet stream pattern is an excellent example of what we expect to occur more frequently as Arctic ice continues to melt.

Francis told me this week that “the highly amplified pattern that the jet stream has been in since early December is certainly playing a role in the CA drought.”

“The extremely strong ridge over Alaska has been very persistent and has caused record warmth and unprecedented winter rains in parts of AK while preventing Pacific storms from delivering rain to CA,” she explained. “But is this pattern a result of human-caused climate change, or more specifically, to rapid Arctic warming and the dramatic losses of sea ice? It’s very difficult to pin any specific weather event on climate change, but this extremely distorted and persistent jet stream pattern is an excellent example of what we expect to occur more frequently as Arctic ice continues to melt.”

While there is no doubt that climate change is making droughts more intense, the specific connection the loss of Arctic ice is emerging science, and some, like Trenberth, are skeptical that the case has been made.

Whether or not there is a proven link to the loss of Arctic ice, Senior Weather Channel meteorologist (and former skeptic) Stu Ostro has been documenting “large magnitude ridges in the mid-upper level geopotential height field” lasting as long as many months that “have been conspicuous in the meteorology of extreme weather phenomena.”

Ostro gave a talk last year (with Franics), and as Climate Desk summarized, “Ostro’s observations suggest that global warming is increasing the atmosphere’s thickness, leading to stronger and more persistent ridges of high pressure, which in turn are a key to temperature, rainfall, and snowfall extremes and topsy-turvy weather patterns like we’ve had in recent years.”

The climate is changing. “All of our weather is now, and increasingly in the future, influenced by climate change,” Gleick wrote me. “The question about attribution (i.e., is this drought caused by climate change) is, of course, the wrong question — easy for deniers to dismiss because it is not easy to show unambiguous links to some kinds of individual events.”

What is especially worrisome is that climate change has only just started to have an impact on Western droughts. We’ve only warmed 1.5°F in the past century. Absent strong climate action, we are on track to warm 10°F over the next century!

We continue to dawdle even though scientists have been warning us of what was coming for decades. Hansen himself co-authored a 1990 study, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” which projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

All of our weather is now, and increasingly in the future, influenced by climate change.

So we should listen to Hansen’s current warnings. In 2012 he warned in the NY Times of a return to Dust Bowls, writing, “over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought … California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

Hansen repeated those concerns in an email to me this week, noting that the current drought “will break, of course, likely with the upcoming El Nino, but as long as we keep increasing greenhouse gases, intense droughts will increase, especially in the Southwest. Rainfall, when and where it comes will tend to be in more intense events, with more extreme flooding. These are not speculations, the science is clear.”

How long can these droughts last? They have lasted for decades in the distant past, and one 2010 study warned that we could see “an unprecedented combination” of multi-decade droughts “with even warmer temperatures.”

Drought researcher Aiguo Dai was quoted in a 2012 NCAR news release for a 2012 study warning, “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999.”

This week I asked him, “Do you still stand by that statement?” He replied:

Yes, I still stand by that statement. The model projections have not changed. To the extent we can trust the CMIP [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project] model projections, I still think the U.S. will experience increased risk of drought in the coming decades. What has been happening during recent years in the central and western U.S. is very consistent to what I have been predicting: both the natural variability (IPO [Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation]) and human-induced climate change will increase the risk of drought over these regions for the next 1-2 decades. After that, the IPO may switch to a positive phase that normally would bring more rain over the U.S. regions, but by that time the human-induced warming have over-dominate the natural variability, with the U.S. regions still in drier conditions (compared with the 1980s-1990s).

Finally, a 2009 NOAA-led paper warned that, for the Southwest and many semi-arid regions around the world, “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.” Impacts that should be expected if we don’t aggressively slash carbon pollution “are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era.”

Well, they shut San Onofre, apparently because our nuclear infrastructure is withering under constant assault from people who claim to be concerned about climate change, but are nonetheless opposed to the humanity’s largest source of climate change gas free primary energy, nuclear energy.As a result, California’s climate emissions to produce electricity, like those of Germany, are rising, not falling.Probably millions of kilos of dangerous fossil fuels were burned to run servers to reflect on the fact that a few atoms of Cs-134 from Fukushima were found in a tuna fish off California. It stated right in the PNAS article (PNAS 2012 109 (24) 9483-9486) that the radioactivity was dwarfed by natural radioactivity, not that this stopped a smidgeon of the hysterics about nuclear power, hysterics that are never encountered when discussing the more than 6 million people who die each year from biomass and fossil fuel related air pollution.I love California; I really do; I spent 15 years of my life there. But intellectually, it’s yet another place where anti-nuke rhetoric is working to destroy the planetary atmosphere and with it, tens of millions of lives.There was too much Amory Lovins type nonsense pushed around in that State, and too little rationality, and now it is just another cog in “too much hell to pay.” They’re covering their deserts with soon to be dusty glass, coated, I’m afraid with toxic cadmium telluride. In less than two decades all that junk will be just so much more electronic waste, more waste than the desert itself ever was.To what end?If they end up desalinating the ocean just to flush their toilets, the energy they’ll use for this purification process will be from dangerous natural gas, and the waste from those operations will be dumped in humanity’s favorite waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.As you sow, Joe, so shall you reap.

0

| - ShareHide Replies ∧

Guest

Chrisopther Lusvardi

February 6, 2014 18:32

I would respectfully draw the readers’ attention to a new book by California State University at San Francisco wildlife biologist Jim Steele: Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism.The finding of Prof. Steele are: “It’s not getting hotter, just less colder.”In Chapter 1 of his book he shows how using average temperatures to plot climate trends is misleading. Instead Steele uses high and low temperatures which can’t be statistically smoothed or manipulated that easily. He found the maximum temperatures have declined and minimum temperatures have risen over the last 100 years near Lake Tahoe, California. Steele shows that what affects the biosphere isn’t global climate but urbanization and ocean temperature cycles calle El Ninos (wet monsoon rainstorm years) and La Ninas (dry years) [also called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation]. Steele’s data analysis and biological field studies show that Emperor Penguins and Polar Bears are not becoming extinct. Steele concludes that “although it is wise to think globally, all wildlife reacts locally.”Steele uses social psychology to show how scientists unintentionally creat powerful illusions that prejudice the conclusions of their studies. He writes: “any hypothesis that appeals to our prejudices readily possesses our minds.” Steele’s credentials as an environmentalist are impeccable and his book is totally non-ideological.I would refer readers who are interested in California’s climate change and emerging natural drought to consider Steele’s empirical approach to the issue. We know now, the a low pressure zone off the California coast has caused an interruption of the state’s winter rain cycle resulting in very little snowpack into a third consecutive dry year. This means that it is unlikely the state’s reservoirs will be replenished this year and thus there is a drought. But the California drought has been compounded by regulatory drought.58% of farm water in California’s Central Valley has been interdicted by court orders and regulations for diversion to restore salmon runs along the San Joaquin River. So stored water is now flushed to the ocean instead of going into the terrestrial water cycle. Additionally, 453,000 acre feet of water (enough to supply 2.7 million people with water or 151,000 acres of crop land with irrigation water for one year) was intentionally spilled from Lake Trinity in 2013 to restore salmon runs for Indian tribes and sports fishermen along the Trinity River. That water drew down the Trinity Lake water storage that would have been available for farms going into the third year of a drought. The inflexibility of the Endangered Species Act is a major contributing factor in California’s farm water drought. This is now causing a major loss of hydropower to backup the loss of power from San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant shut down (possibly caused by tubes being overstressed from using San Onofre as a peaker plant??). If a fail safe planning principle had been adhered to, California would have enough storage water to weather a drought. The lesson that can be learned from California taking river water away from farmers for fish restoration is: If you’re going to mandate diversions of river water away from farms for fish, fund farm water replacement projects first in the event of a catastrophic drought.Droughts are natural in California; water shortages are man made.

0

| - ShareHide Replies ∧

Guest

Chrisopther Lusvardi

February 6, 2014 19:40

The studies shown above aren’t science because they don’t try to falsify their hypothesis but instead reach for data that proves their prophecies. The loss of 2,200 megawatts of power from the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant shut down (caused by tubes banging against each other possibly from running it as a peaker plant to meet green power ramping demands???) is mainly being replaced with imported natural gas power. Given that California is curtailing its reliance on about 25% of its power mainly to Los Angeles and 12 other nearby cities from coal fired power plants in Utah, Nevada, and elsewhere, and the San Onofre lost power is being replaced with cleaner natural gas power, there is probably less so-called Greenhouse Gas Emissions due to the shut down of San Onofre. There are slanted reports showing greater air pollution since the San Onofre shut down but those reports do not consider the curtaiment of out-of-state coal fired power by LADWP and 12 other cities in Southern California. The drought Calfiornia is experiencing is not related to global warming. It is caused by a low pressure ridge off the coast of California which has blocked winter monsoon rains in the third year of a natural dry spell. The reason for the “drought” is regulatory not solely meteorological. Reservoirs, mainly Trinity Lake, were drawn down going into the third year of the current dry spell to restore salmon runs in the Trinity River for Indian Tribes and sports fishermen and in the San Joaquin River for environmentalists. That has resulted in California having very thin hydropower reserves in 2014 to back up the San Onofre shut down and thin water storage for farmers. Environmental spillages from Lake Trinity for fish restoration in 2013 totaled 453,000 acre feet of water (enough water for 2.7 million urban people for one year or for irrigating 151,000 acres of farmland for one year). Another 815,000 acre feet of water (enough for 4.9 million people or 217,000 acres of cropland) was flushed to the ocean for salmon restoration along the San Joaquin River in 2012. The Endangered Species Act is what is driving these water spillages. If those environmental spillages of water were not done there would be no drought per se because California would have had enough water storage to manage the lack of rain and snowpack for one year. So global warming theory and its accompanying ideology is causing drought (i.e., water shortages) in California via the Endangered Species Act and its clone the California Environmental Quality Act. But as eminent California state biologist Jim Steele reports in his new book “Landscape and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism,” there is no evidence of global warming from temperature readings from Lake Tahoe over the last 100 years. He concludes that we aren’t getting hotter, just less cooler — which is not consistent with global warming theory.

We need to Ban Fracking and implement a Residential and Commercial Feed in Tariff through out the Nation, this petition, starts in California.California, there is enough Residential Solar to power 2.25 San Onofres, couple that with a Residential and Commercial Feed in Tariff and we can solve some of these environmental and electrical generating problems.The Southwest is in the midst of a record drought, some 14 years in the making, which means the water supply for many Western states – California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada – is drying up. Last month the Bureau of Reclamation announced they’re cutting the flow of water into Lake Mead, which has already lost 100 feet of water since the drought began.What happens if the Southwest drought does not end soon?Will we keep using 3 to 6 million gallons of Clean Water per Fracked well, to extract natural gas?This petition will ask the California Regulators and Law makers to allocate Renewable Portfolio Standards to Ca. Home Owners for a Residential Feed in Tariff, the RPS is the allocation method that is used to set aside a certain percentage of electrical generation for Renewable Energy in the the State. The State of California has mandated that 33% of its Energy come from Renewable Energy by 2020.The state currently produces about 71% of the electricity it consumes, while it imports 8% from the Pacific Northwest and 21% from the Southwest.This is how we generate our electricity in 2011, natural gas was burned to make 45.3% of electrical power generated in-state. Nuclear power from Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo County accounted for 9.15%, large hydropower 18.3%, Renewable 16.6% and coal 1.6%. There is 9% missing from San Onofre and with the current South Western drought, how long before the 18.3% hydro will be effected?Another generator of power that jumps out is natural gas, 45.3%, that is a lot of Fracked Wells poisoning our ground water, 3 to 6 million gallons of water are used per well. If Fracking is safe why did Vice Pres Cheney lobby and win Executive, Congressional, and Judicial exemptions from:Clean Water Act.Safe Drinking Water.Act Clean Air Act.Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.Emergency Planning Community Right to Know Act.National Environmental Policy Act.”Americans should not have to accept unsafe drinking water just because natural gas is cheaper than Coal. the Industry has used its political power to escape accountability, leaving the American people unprotected, and no Industry can claim to be part of the solution if it supports exemptions from the basic Laws designed to ensure that we have Clean Water and Clean Air” Natural Resources Defense Council.We have to change how we generate our electricity, with are current drought conditions and using our pure clean water for Fracking, there has to be a better way to generate electricity, and there is, a proven stimulating policy. The Feed in Tariff is a policy mechanism designed to accelerate investment in Renewable Energy, the California FiT allows eligible customers generators to enter into 10- 15- 20- year contracts with their utility company to sell the electricity produced by renewable energy, and guarantees that anyone who generates electricity from R E source, whether Homeowner, small business, or large utility, is able to sell that electricity. It is mandated by the State to produce 33% R E by 2020.FIT policies can be implemented to support all renewable technologies including:WindPhotovoltaics (PV)Solar thermalGeothermalBiogasBiomassFuel cellsTidal and wave power. There is currently 3 utilities using a Commercial Feed in Tariff in California Counties, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, and Sacramento, are paying their businesses 17 cents per kilowatt hour for the Renewable Energy they generate. We can get our Law makers and Regulators to implement a Residential Feed in Tariff, to help us weather Global Warming, insulate our communities from grid failures, generate a fair revenue stream for the Homeowners and protect our Water.The 17 cents per kilowatt hour allows the Commercial Business owner and the Utility to make a profit.Commercial Ca. rates are 17 – 24 cents per kilowatt hour.Implementing a Residential Feed in Tariff at 13 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 2,300 MW, and then allow no more than 3-5 cents reduction in kilowatt per hour, for the first tier Residential rate in you area and for the remaining capacity of Residential Solar, there is a built in Fee for the Utility for using the Grid. A game changer for the Hard Working, Voting, Tax Paying, Home Owner and a Fair Profit for The Utility, a win for our Children, Utilities, and Our Planet. We also need to change a current law, California law does not allow Homeowners to oversize their Renewable Energy systems.Campaign to allow Californian residents to sell electricity obtained by renewable energy for a fair pro-business market price. Will you read, sign, and share this petition?http://signon.org/sign/let-california-home-owners“Solar is absolutely great as long as you stay away from leases and PPAs. Prices for solar have dropped so dramatically in the past year, that leasing a solar system makes absolutely no sense in today’s market.The typical household system is rated at about 4.75 kW. After subtracting the 30% federal tax credit, the cost would be $9,642 to own this system. The typical cost to lease that same 4.75 kW system would be $35,205 once you totaled up the 20 years worth of lease payments and the 30% federal tax credit that you’ll have to forfeit when you lease a system. $9,642 to own or $35,205 to lease. Which would you rather choose?If you need $0 down financing then there are much better options than a lease or PPA. FHA is offering through participating lenders, a $0 down solar loan with tax deductible interest and only a 650 credit score to qualify. Property Assessed Clean Energy loans are available throughout the state that require no FICO score checks, with tax deductible interest that allow you to make your payments through your property tax bill with no payment due until November 2014. Both of these programs allow you to keep the 30% federal tax credit as well as any applicable cash rebate. With a lease or PPA you’ll have to forfeit the 30% tax credit and any cash rebate, and lease or PPA payments are not tax deductible.Solar leases and PPA served their purpose two years ago when no other viable form of financing was available, but today solar leases and PPAs are two of the most expensive ways to keep a solar system on your roof.” Ray Boggs.

0

| - ShareHide Replies ∧

Guest

Peter Mott

February 7, 2014 23:21

Cutting CO2 emissions will not help because the CO2 in the atmosphere will be there for hundreds of years. You need to solve the problem of drought, emissions scenarios are just a distraction.